Look the Sheepdog in the Eye

Perhaps the simplest place to keep a secret is in plain sight. If the truth is something no sane man wants to know. So Asta walks easily among the Londoners swirling like day-old confetti through the grey evening light beside the Thames. Eyes glide from her, faces turn aside. Who among the sheep, after all, can look the sheepdog in the eye?

The carefree people enrage you, says the Voice—the scraping, taunting intrusion that rings in her head like a cracked bell—Have you in any of your lives heard a greater medley of drivel? A mocking question she knows it has pulled from her own mind.

“There’s value in their innocence. Beauty.”

You? So sentimental?

“It’s what my kind risk our lives for.”

You’re immortal.

Asta snorts.

Well, yes. You die. You live again. The dying is, I imagine…unpleasant. But the Voice savours that final word, as though the idea has great appeal to its disembodied owner. And who’s to say this life won’t be your last? We talk of the mysteries of the universe after all.

Another question, Asta knows, stolen from the hollowest parts of her.

You called it Innocence. I think you believe it’s Ignorance.

“They sometimes call that Bliss.” Asta’s depthless eyes sweep the people drifting by. Their bland faces. The careless way their hands graze and hold. As evening deepens, tiny lights are winking on, swagged across the awnings of pubs and restaurants. Casting the crowds in swaths of gold. If shadows dog their footsteps, Asta can’t see them.

She watches. Tries a smile.

“Ludicrous.” Her or them, though, she isn’t sure.

Skimming her fingers along the embankment wall, they come away stained as if with long-congealed blood. Catching its scent, she flinches back. The water, black under the night sky, reflecting the particoloured lights of a city gliding into the nocturnal, is slicked with something that drifts on the current; something that catches those lights with a noxious, oily sheen.

“Found you, Foras.”

Mmm, first name terms. How delicious.

Using her clean hand to pull a handkerchief from one of many trouser pockets, Asta wipes away the stain before summoning a spark of her Power to her fingertips. Touching its flame to the ruined cloth, the fabric goes up as if the stain were gasoline, the fire burning black.

---

She descends at Trig Lane, making for Blackfriars Bridge along the shoreline. Below the embankment walls, the city’s hum is dulled, and she’s swept by a consuming sense of sinking into the netherworld. As dark and distant from humanity as hell could ever be.

Asta, Darling. You need nothing but an invitation.

Spectres erupt from the river, spraying her with brackish water and putrid black-red sludge. Power licks at her insides, urging her to reach for the daggers sheathed at the small of her back; wreath them in her flames and cut down the enemy. But these are the lost souls of the humans she lives to guard, and she stays her hand.

Ghostly fingers pluck at her clothes, her hair.

They like you, Darling.

Hands clamp her forearms, dragging her into the river and through the freezing, fetid water. The Voice in her head is thunderous. Laughing. Until the spectres fling her, half-drowned, into the stinking darkness where what was once the Fleet river lets London’s dregs into the Thames.

At the feet of the Demon, waiting for her.

“Darling,” outside her head, his Voice is the sound of fire consuming flesh and bone. “Together at last.”

Squatting his bulk against the culvert wall, the white orbs of his eyes watch the effluent river running past his clawed feet. Asta realises she’s seeing by the low blue light of spectres that flow with the water. Even as she looks, Foras reaches to fish up a handful of the ghosts, gapes his maw and drops them in. He chews, jaw working wetly. Then uses a muscular grey tongue to tuck the dimming, masticated spirits between the fangs and upper lip to one side of his mouth. Asta turns aside, stomach roiling, only to catch the ecstatic twitching of his barbed tail—the blue ghost-light gleaming on the deadly forked tip.

“I can give you what you want.”

“What do I want?” Asta summons the words.

“You’ve been a loyal guard dog. And they can’t even look at you. To see you is to fear there’s something to be protected from. They’re weak. They can never love you as you’ve earned.”

Asta’s eyes climb to his, see the blue glow haunting the blank white, the way they seem to roll euphorically in the sockets.

“You’ll hunt my kind. We’ll kill yours. On and on. Unending. Unchanging.” Without warning, he spits into the water. The reddish stain goes swirling through the spectres.

“You’ll…” Asta commands her feet to step toward him, commands her eyes to meet his. Keeps her mind away from the movement of her hands toward the small of her back. “Release me?”

“I’ll reshape you.”

Asta reaches the Demon, close enough to smell the blood-and-rust stink of his skin. Hear the suck of saliva gathering in his mouth. He turns his head and spits. She waits for the eyes to come back to her, watches the smoky glow of stolen, defiled human souls.

“Never.”

Filling the paired silver daggers with fire as she moves, she buries them to their hilts in the soft skin beneath the Demon’s jaw. Hot blood cascades from the wounds, bathing her wrists.

A moment, a beat of stillness filled with nothing but the almost-sound of slow-running water. Fast-dripping blood. The white fog of Foras’s eyes, their ghostly glow slowly drifting, staring into hers.

So deceitful, Darling. Deprived of his working jaw, Foras’s Voice rings in Asta’s head once again. Are you so sure you’re not already one of my creatures?

Pain.

Pain like lightning through her flesh and her mind and her spirit as Foras’s tail lashes up to bind her in the crushing death grip of a vast, furious python. Its barbs tear her skin, shred the fat and muscle beneath.

Dragging her will from deep beneath the agony, Asta keeps her hands on the hilts of her daggers, holds her arms strong. The flames of her Power lick at the Demon's skin, burning blood drips down his neck to char the rope-like braid of his wiry black hair. But his hide is thick, and her Power is weakened by her pain, and he does not burn.

Then we will see how well you die this time, little Hunter.

At first, she only thinks something has punched her in the back, her mind confused, searching for what it might be. Until she feels the forked tip of Foras’s tail grind against the bones of her ribcage, and the drench of her own blood sheeting down her back. That there could be more pain had seemed impossible, and yet there is. Wave after wave of it. Astonishing in its white-hot brilliance. Blinding and unstoppable. She can’t fall, though she’s no longer standing, held in the iron bands of the Demon’s tail. She can’t think. Only wait, in the belly of the lightning, to die yet again. Perhaps this time, for good.

She sees her fires go out. Sees her hands—as though belonging to some other body— slipping from the hilts of her daggers. Foras makes no move to pull them from his neck. As if consumed with watching her die, he barely notices them. As if they give him no pain.

A thought comes, and with it Asta feels stupid, small: it isn’t fair. All this pain, only for her. For him, nothing but the gleeful pleasure of her death. She can see it, shining in the glass-white mirror of his eyes. It occurs to her, in a faded way, that she has pain to spare. Pain to give him. And her hands are rising now, somehow hers again. Grasping. Her dagger handles, familiar in her palms. Comforting.

Asta smiles as she gives Foras the lightning. Every burning, screaming shard of obliterating pain. She sends it into her daggers. Into her Power. Into him.

Fire blazes between them. The Demon’s skin curls from his bones like burning paper. Flames burst from the sockets of his eyes, drip from his gaping mouth. The scream that shakes the tunnel has a shattering echo that rakes sharp claws through Asta’s brain, but she does not stop.

With a snap of his tail, Foras flings her aside; the forked tip coming free with a rib-snapping twist. She lands hard, half up against the damp stone wall, all her injuries jarring. Perhaps he expected breaking her grip on the daggers to kill her flames. Asta will never find out, as a cracked, hysterical laugh scrapes between her gritted teeth, and she lets the last of her exhausted Power sing through her blades. Foras claws at their handles, sending their fire eagerly spreading to his hands, racing up his arms. Consuming his wings in twin gushes of flame, as though they'd never been anything more than the flammable, polyester imitations of a child's costume. His agonised screaming dies into guttural heaving, into gasping. Into silence. In Asta’s mind, the oil slick of his presence winks out into nothing.

She lies where he’s thrown her, careless of her legs in the filthy water. Letting her fire warm her as it burns the Demon’s carcass to ash, and her wounds knit themselves closed. She’s patient, eyes half lidded. Listening to the slowing drip of her own blood and the chatter of the flames, and feeling the dull aches of her healing body. For a while—her job done—she simply…lives.

---

By the time the vast body is consumed in cleansing fire and Asta has trudged back to the stairs and up to street level, pink dawn has passed into pale morning. She breathes the clean air with relief. Points her face at the broad, cloud-ruffled sky. Looks at the people yawning toward the day. And notices what’s gone overlooked until now. They’re not bland. Some are smiling, it’s true. But some are not. Some are sad. Some are angry. Some weary. Some laugh, others cry.

And some are looking back at her. A young mother, though scared, pulls her eyes up and offers a shy smile. A taxi driver, leaning on his cab and sucking down a coffee, catches her eye and gives a curt nod.

“You were wrong,” she says, firm and aloud. To Foras, for all that he’s dead. To the memory of his cajoling voice in her mind.

To herself.